WordPress 2018 year in review

It goes without saying, Gutenberg was and still is the biggest and boldest thing that happened in the WordPress ecosystem this year. Ever since it was announced at WordCamp Europe last year, Gutenberg kept stirring debates and disagreements among worldwide community members.

As Matt announced in his last year’s SOTW, 2018 was to be the year of the Gutenberg-based site customization, followed by the new default theme. The long-coming change was about to happen given the fact that more and more new people were discovering WordPress but wanted better user experience.

WCEU 2018

This year was also a year WCEU broke the record in the number of people attending the most significant conference about WordPress. And it just happened that the host city was our very own, Belgrade, Serbia, so we covered it all around and even wrote a WCEU 2018 takeaways for all of you who might have missed it. Anyhow, this event was another good opportunity Matt used to further explain the changes in the WordPress ecosystem such as:

While the Gutenberg team has worked hard to implement some fundamental accessibility features (e.g., focus management, navigate landmark regions), the overall user experience is terribly complicated for users with accessibility needs at the point the new editor is barely usable for them.

Did all went as planned? Not much. Not everyone was happy about it; there was even a Twitter feud among WordPress community. Still, the change in a form of WordPress 5.0 Bebo came and is here to stay. Both developers and end users need to accept it since it is a good change, after all. The one that made us upgrade and make all of our themes Gutenberg compliant as well, so you might want to check them out if you’re looking for relevant and up-to-date premium themes.

State of the Word 2018

Either way, just one day after official 5.0 release, Matt held his 2018 State of the Word ensuring people everything was to be more than ok and announcing the new updates for the upcoming months:

Summary

2018 proved to be a very intense and everchanging year for the WordPress community. We learned that the change was inevitable but also that it seems to have broken some connections and relationships. Is Gutenberg the future of WordPress? Undoubtedly so. Is it 100% ready? Not even close, still, it is a good and refreshing change that will, in the end, modernize and improve the overall UX for the end users. Will it force us (theme and plugin developers) to change? Yes, even Matt stated that we wouldn’t need so many themes in the future. A bold and, maybe disturbing statement, still – as Barney Stinson said:

Ivana Cirkovic

Ivana is a Digital Marketing, PR and Social Media consultant with over nine years experience in the field. She is also a WordPress enthusiast and an active member of WordPress community who lives online almost 24/7. In love with Twitter, WP, photography and NYC.